[philips]

1) Yes, Kubernetes relies on etcd as its primary database. Right now the etcd Operator does not tackle trying to manage the etcd that Kubernetes relies on. But! We are working on that as part of our self-hosted work https://coreos.com/blog/self-hosted-kubernetes.html. Stay tuned.

2) etcd can deal with any latency up to seconds long for say a globally replicated etcd. But! You need to tune etcd to expect that latency so it doesn't trigger a leader election. See the tuning guide: https://coreos.com/etcd/docs/latest/tuning.html

3) The backups are something that we are just getting to with the etcd Operator. Our intention is to help you create backups and create new clusters from arbitrarily old backups, but that work hasn't started yet.